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Oculus Quest headsets now account for nearly 44% of all headsets used on Steam, and this clearly hasn’t gone unnoticed by Valve. An update to the latest SteamVR beta aims to make the experience easier for new users.

Despite making its own VR headset, Valve has stayed true to its commitment to make SteamVR a hardware agnostic platform, including for Quest headsets which can be plugged into to a PC to play PC VR games.

Last year the company updated SteamVR to improve the reliability of the software when used with both wired and wireless Quest headsets. Occasionally the headsets could lose connection to the PC which could look to SteamVR like they had suddenly been unplugged. The update aimed to make SteamVR better at smoothing out those connection blips so that players wouldn’t need to restart the software.

Today the company released SteamVR Beta 1.21.5 which brings more changes to make the software play nicer with Quest headsets, especially for first-time users.

According to the update notes, SteamVR will now check to see if a Quest headset is connected to the user’s computer and remind them that they first need to start Oculus Link inside their headset before they can use SteamVR.

Similarly, if the software can’t find the Oculus service (part of the Oculus PC software and required to use the headset with SteamVR), it will tell users that they need to first install the Oculus PC software.

These are small changes but clearly intended to help new users, especially the latter change which will be beneficial for users who might think they can use their Quest directly with SteamVR without the need to install any additional hardware.

As with most SteamVR beta updates, these changes will eventually be released to everyone. If you want to check it out today you can do so easily by opting into the SteamVR Beta yourself:

Opt into SteamVR Beta

• In your Steam games list, right-click on SteamVR > Properties > Select the ‘Betas’ tab
• In the drop down list, select ‘SteamVR Beta Update’
• Allow SteamVR to update